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Analysis of medieval love, satirical and Crusade lyrics of the trouabdours. Study of deictic address, corporeal subjectivity, the female voice, love debates, and the body as a figure of political conflict. Course readings include medieval treatises on lyric and modern translations of the troubadour tradition. Works by Ovid, Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, La Comtessa de Dia, Thibaut de Champagne, Raimon Vidal, Dante, and Pound. Taught in English. Course includes a lab component for creation of multi-media translation projects: trobar. stanford.edu.

Last offered: Winter 2018
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II, WAY-ED

FRENCH 219:The Renaissance Body in French Literature and Medicine (FRENCH 319)

If the Renaissance is famous for discovering unknown continents and ancient texts the body too was a new territory of conquest. How did literature respond to the rise of an anatomical gaze in the arts and in medicine and how did it stage the aesthetic religious philosophical and moral issues related to such a promotion or deconstruction of the body? Does literature aim at representing the body or does it use it instead as a ubiquitous signifier for intellectual emotional and political ideas? The locus of desire, pleasure and disease, the body also functioned as a reminder of human mortality and was caught in the web of gender issues, religious controversies and new norms of behavior. Texts from prose fiction (Rabelais) poetry (Scève Ronsard Labé D'Aubigné) essays (Montaigne) and emblem literature. Extra documents include music scores tapestries paintings philosophical and anatomical plates from medical treatises. Taught in English; readings in French and English.

Casablanca, Algiers and Tunis embody three territories, real and imaginary, which never cease to challenge the preconceptions of travelers setting sight on their shores. In this class, we will explore the myriad ways in which these cities of North Africa, on the edge of Europe and of Africa, have been narrated in literature, cinema, and popular culture. We will look at the historical development shaping their respective architecture and why they became the three major urban centers in North Africa. Home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, they are an ebullient laboratory of social, political, religious, and cultural issues, global and local, between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. We will look at mass images of these cities, from films to maps, novels to photographs, sketching a new vision of these magnets as places where power, social rituals, legacies of the Ottoman and French colonial past, and the influence of the global economy collude and collide. Special focus on class, gender, and race. Open to both undergrad and grad students!

FRENCH 237A:Nationhood and Nationalism in France: Modern French history through film and fiction (FRENCH 337, HISTORY 237J, HISTORY 337J)

Europe is seeing a rise in nationalist politics, fueled by fear of economic instability and immigration. In France, Marine Le Pen's far-right populist party Rassemblement National (until June 2018 - the Front National) has dominated political debates, insisting on preserving French national sovereignty. But what is a nation? What does it mean to be French? Who is included and who is excluded? In this course we will explore the construction of the idea of France in the face of revolution, the world wars and the Holocaust, and the violent end of colonialism. By looking at these critical historical moments, we will also gain a firmer grasp of contemporary problems surrounding nationhood in France and around the world. Sources will include films, novels, pamphlets, and political speeches. Course taught in English, with an optional French section.

FRENCH 238:Art and the Market (ARTHIST 238C)

This course examines the relationship between art and the market, from the château-builders of the French Renaissance to avant-garde painters in the nineteenth-century Salon des Refusés. Using examples drawn from France, this course explores the relationship between artists and patrons, the changing status of artists in society, patterns of shifting taste, and the effects of museums on making and collecting art. Students will read a mixture of historical texts about art and artists, fictional works depicting the process of artistic creation, and theoretical analyses of the politics embedded in artworks. They will engage in sustained analysis of individual artworks, as well as the market structures in which such artworks were produced and bought. The course will be taught in English, with the option of readings in French for departmental majors.

FRENCH 239:The Afterlife of the Middle Ages (FRENCH 339)

Literary works that evoke a medieval past in contrast to a historical present, and critical texts that treat aspects of the medieval or medievalism. How does the concept of medievalism emerge and evolve through the ages? Topics include periodization, philology, critical theory, the study of Gothic architecture, and the use of the term medieval in modern political discourse and postcolonial studies. Authors include Burckhardt, Camille, Chateaubriand, Chrétien de Troyes, Didi-Huberman, Jauss, Michelet, Panofsky, Pound, films by Dreyer and Bergman, and contemporary poetry. Taught in English.

Last offered: Autumn 2017
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

FRENCH 244:The Enlightenment (DLCL 324, HISTORY 234, HISTORY 334, HISTORY 432A, HUMNTIES 324)

The Enlightenment as a philosophical, literary, and political movement. Themes include the nature and limits of philosophy, the grounds for critical intellectual engagement, the institution of society and the public, and freedom, equality and human progress. Authors include Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, Diderot, and Condorcet.

FRENCH 246:Body over Mind (FRENCH 346, ITALIAN 346)

How does modern fiction, aided by modern philosophy, give the lie to Descartes' famous "I think therefore I am"? And how does writing convey the desire for a different, perhaps stronger, integration of mind and body? Does the body speak a particular truth that we must learn to hear, that the mind is not always connected to? How do modern metaphors for the mind-body connection shape our experience? These questions will be explored via the works of major French and Italian writers and thinkers, including Pirandello, Calvino, Camus, Houellebecq, Sartre, and Agamben.

Last offered: Autumn 2016
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

FRENCH 247:Islam and the Western Imagination (COMPLIT 147S, CSRE 147S, FRENCH 347, HISTORY 230J)

With fear of Islamic terrorism running high and restrictive immigration policies at home, it is more urgent than ever to understand the complex and changing relations between Islam and the West, the West and Islam. Using France's history and culture as a main study case, along with other Western contexts, this course will look at the long history of Europe's interactions with the Muslim world, as well as the presence of Islam and Muslims in the West, from the 7th century to the present day. Uncovering the long and complex relationship between France and Islam, historical, literary and media sources will help us explore early Christian myths about Islam, the period of European coexistence, European colonialism in North Africa and the Middle East, the place of feminism in Western-Muslim relations, (post)colonial immigration and finally, a post-9/11 world order characterized by new forms of Islamophobia. In the context of the course, students will be exposed to primary sources including audiovisual materials, literature, manifestos, and theory. Readings will be in English (and optional readings in French for students who would prefer to read in French).

FRENCH 249:The Algerian Wars (CSRE 249, HISTORY 239G, JEWISHST 249)

From Algiers the White to Algiers the Red, Algiers, the Mecca of the Revolutionaries in the words of Amilcar Cabral, this course offers to study the Algerian Wars since the French conquest of Algeria (1830-) to the Algerian civil war of the 1990s. We will revisit the ways in which the war has been narrated in literature and cinema, popular culture, and political discourse. A special focus will be given to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). The course considers the racial representations of the war in the media, the continuing legacies surrounding the conflict in France, Africa, and the United States, from Che Guevara to the Black Panthers. A key focus will be the transmission of collective memory through transnational lenses, and analyses of commemorative events and movies. nReadings from James Baldwin, Assia Djebar, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, Mouloud Feraoun. Movies include "The Battle of Algiers," "Days of Glory," and "Viva Laldjérie." nTaught in English.